5 First-Time Infographics That Absolutely Rock

In 1988, a young boy named Alan had been playing in the Southampton youth ranks. After two years, the coach promoted him to the first team. In his first game, he scored three goals as the Saints beat Arsenal 4-2. He was 17 years and 240 days old – and became the youngest player to score a hat-trick, beating a 30-year record. The boy’s name was Alan Shearer, who later became a memorable english striker.

The lesson here is you don’t need to be a seasoned expert to do amazing things. Everyone is a beginner at some point in their careers. The same could be applied to design: in this post we hand-picked 5 different infographics designed by first-timers using Piktochart. They all have one thing in common: they absolutely rock. I sincerely hope you use them as inspiration.

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The Untapped Potential of Infographics

Acupuncture and the Digestive System, by Patricia Kowal

A little bit of background on Patricia

Patricia is an acupuncturist and Chinese herbal practitioner with a background in crisis counseling and American Sign Language interpreting. She has an interest in educating others in a visual manner because that’s where she feels she learns the most, but she has absolutely no background in design.

What’s the infographic about?

Patricia’s infographic is about the specific acupuncture points that acupuncturists use to help the digestive system restore its proper functioning. “Often when the digestive system isn’t working, we will have many other symptoms as well, which is why it is so important to aim at maintaining a healthy digestion”, explains Patricia.

Why Piktochart?

Patricia picked Piktochart for a simple reason: “it is a very easy platform that helps create visuals others can be inspired by. Initially I was just “testing the waters” wondering if it would actually work”. She spent some time playing with Piktochart’s editor, and she felt pleasantly surprised: “Come to find out, it was exactly what I needed to create the educational materials I was looking for”.

Facing Your First Obstacles and Overcoming Them

Patricia’s first challenge was having a clear idea of what information to utilize in the design: “at first I really had to sort through the material in my head in order to portray it in an easy to understand way and then I had to decide how to visually represent the concepts which I felt were important and suited the topic of the infographic”, explains Patricia. This is a common problem, usually solved by creating a structure or a draft on paper.

Patricia also spent some time trying to understand what Piktochart is all about: “There was a learning curve with the program which I had to get used to (getting to know the icons, searching for alternative icons if one that I wanted wasn’t available). I overcame it by getting to know the program and what was available to me, familiarizing myself with it, in order to convey my message”. As they say, practice makes perfect.

The Brandery Class of 2016, by Betsy Zinch

A little bit of background on Betsy

Betsy is a Design Intern at The Brandery, a Cincinnati-based accelerator that’s ranked among the top 10 in the US. She works closely with the managing team to get all design and branding work done for the accelerator and the companies. She needed to find a compelling way to showcase interesting stats about their 2015 cohort of companies, and this is when the above fantastic infographic was born.

What goals were you trying to accomplish with this infographic?

The Brandery team was looking for ways to show the world what their 2015 Class was all about. That piece of content needed to convey a lot of information in an easy-to-grasp form: their deal terms, demographic and age data, where all the applications came from and some other facts about the participants. “The goal I was trying to accomplish was a clean and concise message that would match our brand and offer a nice visual for the community/public. I wanted an infographic that was fun but simple in the same time.”, states Betsy.

Why Piktochart?

Betsy is a designer, but she usually chooses more complex design software: “I usually make infographics on my own in Illustrator or Photoshop and it’s extremely time consuming to get all of the charts and graphs the way I’d like them”. She struggled with the complexity and time required to create an infographic with Adobe software, and when she stumbled into Piktochart, she saw it’s potential: “It offered nice graphs, icons, etc. that I could edit myself to make my own. Also, it allowed me to import my own images to further customize them to fit our brand. That’s why I decided to go with Piktochart”.

Facing Your First Obstacles and Overcoming Them

As a first-time Piktochart user, Betsy struggled with element hierarchy and sizing: “The obstacles I faced were sizing issues, how big of font is too big, and figuring out which pieces of information were the most important to highlight”. She conquered this problem by putting herself in her audience’s shoes, and thinking what would be relevant and impactful for them: “I overcame this by visualizing myself as someone who knows nothing about startups, The Brandery or entrepreneurship. I then went through the statistics and circled important words and numbers that seemed to have a big impact when just reading it”. After that, she worked on hierarchy of information. Did a so-so stat need to be at the top and in forefront of the infographic? Probably not. Betsy made a conscious effort to put the most important information at the top, in bold, and with bigger font: “I wanted to tell the story of how cool The Brandery is. That’s what an infographic really is, telling a story about something”.

Seminary Debt, by Ryan Burns

A little bit of background on Ryan

Ryan works as an operations director at a church in Richmond VA. He is a doer, and he always seems to have a number of side projects to work on during his free time: “My most recent project was to create a filterable online database of seminary scholarships. Graduate studies are expensive no matter what the field, but church jobs typically don’t pay all that well, so seminary debt is a big deal.”

What’s the infographic about?

Ryan’s intention was to get all the available data on the seminary debt he had, and showcase it in a visually compelling, easy to grasp format. That’s why he chose an infographic: “My hope was to take the available data on seminary debt and church compensation and present it in a way that gives people in the church and those considering seminary the opportunity to “see” some of the numbers”.

Why Piktochart?

After he decided that an infographic was the way to go, he did some online research on the topic: “I decided to use Piktochart after googling ‘infographic generator’ and landing on the page”. After comparing the benefits and ease-of-use of every different software in the space, Ryan decided to go with Piktochart: “I looked at several different sites, but Piktochart seemed to have the best templates and user interface. This was my first infographic and I’m not a designer, so I needed something that gave me a beautiful design to begin with and was easy to manipulate into the format I had in my mind.”

Facing Your First Obstacles and Overcoming Them

Ryan seems to be a natural, because he states he didn’t face any real obstacles when creating his first infographic: “The user interface, templates, and tools made it unbelievably easy to create an infographic I was really happy with. I was able to go from an idea to completion in just a couple hours with no real challenges or difficulties. I was so happy to find a tool that did everything I actually hoped it would do”.

5 Reason To Meditate Daily, By Theresa Pablos

A little bit of background on Theresa and the infographic

Theresa is a content creator in the health/technology space and the founding editor of Crunch Theory. Meditation has been getting a lot of attention, and there were a few clinical studies about the benefits that Theresa wanted to share with her readers: “Instead of just writing them out with text (boring!), I wanted to add some color and graphics to really illustrate the benefits of the practice. The infographic I created is about five clinically proven benefits of meditation with illustrations that highlight the relevant information for everyday people.”

Why Piktochart?

A common problem our users face is that they desire to create a fantastic infographic for their audience, but as they are a growing business, they have no marketing budget to invest in professional designers. In the same time they still need a professional looking design. Theresa explains that “because Crunch Theory is still growing, I didn’t have the time or money to use a complex program like InDesign, but I still wanted a professional look.” After researching and trying a few other programs, she landed on Piktochart: “it was the quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to get the quality look I wanted”.

Facing Your First Obstacles and Overcoming Them

Theresa’s only problem was related to picking the right color scheme. She had trouble finding colors that would work together as well as appropriate icons: “While some of the icon colors are editable, others are not. Luckily, Piktochart has plenty of icons to choose from with similar styles, so I was able to pick the icons that I couldn’t change the color of first and then base the other colors on those.”

Firearms Protocol, by Aaron Gorrell

A Little bit of Background on Aaron and the Infographic

Justin is the founder and owner of the Justice Clearinghouse, a membership-based website for justice professionals and people interested in criminal justice. They offer weekly webinars on topics of interest such as firearms investigations, prosecution, law enforcement and more. Aaron regularly offers great content to his members, so he developed this infographic in partnership with the Violent Crimes Division from the Palm Beach County Sheriff. “We wanted to help educate police officers and deputies on how to collect evidence for firearms investigations”, describes Aaron.

Why Piktochart?

“In one word: simplicity”. Aaron is extremely busy, so he has no time to spend hours learning to use other tools. However, Piktochart allowed him to create a great image quickly, without sacrificing quality for his readers.

Facing Your First Obstacles and Overcoming Them

Besides his lack of time and need for speed, Aaron faced one problem: “Keeping the image simple but informative. Most law enforcement officers have notoriously short attention spans and we needed to develop something that kept their attention”. This is a common problem for first-time users, so if you are facing a similar issue we strongly recommend you to read our post 7 Steps Of Transforming Information Into A Clear and Concise Infographic.

Thanks for reading so far! If you want to create your first infographic but don’t know where to start, you’ll find our June Series extremely helpful. Also, if you want to download the 5 infographics featured in this post, you can do so by clicking here.